Design and deliver digital services with customer service first in mind and reflect the technologies used by today’s customers. Agencies must respond to customers’ needs and make it easy to find and share information and accomplish important tasks “anytime, anywhere, any device.”

Use customer-centric design principles; focus efforts where they’ll have the most impact and value; institutionalize performance measurement, and continuously improve services in response to those measurements.

Deliver Better Digital Services Using Modern Tools and Technologies

Improve Priority Customer-Facing Services for Mobile Use

Measure Performance and Customer Satisfaction to Improve Service Delivery

Requires that agencies develop customer service standards that are “understandable to the public, easily accessible at the point of service and on the Internet, and measurable (where appropriate); where possible, standards should include targets for speed, quality/accuracy, and satisfaction.”

Improve Customer Service Delivery

Publish Customer Service Plans

OMB Establish a Customer Service Task Force

Advance Customer Service through Innovative Technology

Each agency establish one “signature initiative” that uses technology to improve the customer experience

Requires agencies to develop, in consultation with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a Customer Service Plan to address how the agency will streamline service delivery and improve customer experience.

Requirements include:

Establishing one major initiative (signature initiative) that will use technology to improve the customer experience;

Establishing mechanisms to solicit customer feedback on Government services and using such feedback regularly to make service improvements;

Setting clear customer service standards and expectations, including, where appropriate, performance goals for customer service required by the GPRA (Government Performance and Results) Modernization Act of 2010 (Public Law 111-352);

Improving the customer experience by adopting proven customer service best practices and coordinating across service channels (such as online, phone, in-person, and mail services);

Streamlining agency processes to reduce costs and accelerate delivery, while reducing the need for customer calls and inquiries; and

Identifying ways to use innovative technologies to accomplish the customer service activities above, thereby lowering costs, decreasing service delivery times, and improving the customer experience.

Requires agencies to post customer service metrics and best practices online.

Enhanced requirements of GPRA requiring agencies to develop annual performance plans that must describe how performance goals are to be achieved, including establishing performance indicators to measure, as appropriate, customer service, efficiency, output, and outcome indicators. Measures should be quantifiable and measurable to define the level of performance to be achieved for program activities each year. Requires each agency performance plan should “establish a balanced set of performance indicators to be used in measuring or assessing progress toward each performance goal, including, as appropriate, customer service, efficiency, output and outcome indicators.

Established a Performance Improvement Council to consider performance improvement experiences of customers (e.g., corporations, nonprofit organizations, foreign, state and local governments) of government services.

Clarifies that the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (the PRA) does not apply to many uses of social media and similar technologies, clearing the way for agencies to use social media and web-based interactive technologies to serve and engage with the public online.

Laid the groundwork for a transparent, participatory and collaborative government by: Publishing Government Information Online; Improving the Quality of Government Information; Creating and Institutionalizing a Culture of Open Government; Creating an Enabling Policy Framework for Open Government.

Open Government Plan:

Transparency: describe steps the agency will take to conduct its work more openly and publish its information online

Participation: promote opportunities for the public to participate throughout the decision-making process.

Collaboration: further cooperation with other Federal and non-Federal governmental agencies, the public, and nonprofit and private entities in fulfilling the agency’s core mission activities

Extends Executive Order 12862, which requires agencies to establish and implement customer service standards; survey customers and employees; benchmark; and publish customer service standards. For the first time, the Federal Government’s customers have been told what they have a right to expect when they ask for service.

Further stated that the government is customer-driven and customer-focused, and clarified expectations regarding agency actions, standards, and measurements, including measuring customer satisfaction as a standard benchmark. Recognized that “without satisfied employees, we cannot have satisfied customers.”

Agencies shall “on an ongoing basis measure results achieved against the customer service standards and should also include customer satisfaction as a measure.

Measure results achieved against the customer service standards and report those results to customers at least annually;

Integrate development and tracking of customer service measures, standards, and performance with other performance initiatives

Survey employees on ideas to improve customer service, motivate and recognize employees for meeting or exceeding customer service standards.

Initiate and support actions that cut across agency lines to serve shared customers

Customer service standards should relate to legislative activities, including strategic planning and performance measurement under the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, reporting on financial and program performance under the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, and the Government Management and Reform Act of 1994.

Requires agencies to establish and implement customer service standards; survey customers and employees; benchmark customer service performance against the best in business (e.g., highest quality of service delivered to customers by private sector organizations providing a comparable or analogous service); publish customer service standards and plans; and publicly report on customer service surveys.

Agencies shall take the following actions:

identify the customers who are, or should be, served by the agency;

survey customers to determine the kind and quality of services they want and their level of satisfaction with existing services;

post service standards and measure results against them;

benchmark customer service performance against the best in business;

survey front-line employees on barriers to, and ideas for, matching the best in business;

provide customers with choices in both the sources of service and the means of delivery;

make information, services, and complaint systems easily accessible; and